I started my Jell-O Art season yesterday...it's a commitment of space so I dragged my feet a little. I have about ten dishes of pieces drying all over the living room, which is where the hottest air sits. It's important to dry the gelatin at the right speed so it doesn't get moldy and you also don't miss the flexible stages you want to use to reach your vision. Most times in these early stages the vision is vague and I love this part where I see what appears from my attempts and then set off to follow those accidental artistic occurrences.
My idea this year, to start anyway, is crowns. I've been pruning the fruit trees and as always I love the branch shapes and have saved a lot of them on my deck rather than just tossing them in the stick tote. I might need a few more sticks to display hats on for retail, but I got to fooling around and put some groups of them together into what might be wall sconces to display Jell-O Art crowns. Then I got some ideas to incorporate the sticks into the structures of the crowns so I embedded some sticks yesterday. We'll see how well they stay in the gelatin, which is mostly going to be a trick of trying not to move the pieces until they get to the right stage of gelling. Which is not something clearly defined, so I expect some do-overs.
The crown idea came from the realization that I have been Queen of Jell-O Art since 2012, so ten years. Actually eleven, if you count the first and last, which of course I must. So this is the start of the 12th. When I was first crowned it was a joke about Queen for a Day but I didn't want to let go so I made myself Queen for life, and that has stuck. Maybe more than I wanted it to. I'm very often referred to as the jello queen although I am not that at all. Google it and you will see why. I don't advocate eating Jell-O. I don't make edible creations if I can avoid it. I'm not Queen of any of that. You might see my photo still, but mostly you find things to eat and some of them are downright inspiring, particularly if you think about making them as art pieces instead of food. Google it anyway, to get you excited about the possibilities.
There's quite a bit on Instagram too, with some celebrities like the Jell-O Knight, David Gibbs, and some people I hope to meet, like yesyoucaneatthat and Adventures in Jelly, all of whom make excellent things of their own inspiration. There's plenty out there that is Jell-O and is art.
But as I began doing as soon as I was crowned, I think often about what being a Queen involves. With the death of Queen Elizabeth recently, I've been looking for satirical humor about colonialism and royalty and have had plenty of thoughts about that too. One of my thoughts is about why people insist on having royalty at all...dividing some people off as elevated in station over all of us ordinary folks who just do living. It's a mystery.
I do get some of it, for instance, starting with little girls and getting them to think of themselves as princesses, and encouraging them to grow into queens in their own self-regard. It definitely beats keeping them confined into the roles of glorified servants and "housewives" and people who are generally subservient or less important than male people who are somewhat automatically given status and titles without much merit in many cases. Even though I find the roles of princesses and queens problematic and unimaginative, it's better than the glass ceilings keeping women out of positions of power in general. I am looking forward to future times when it won't be necessary to have either real, or pretend royalty. I want some other concept where we are all able to reach whatever potential we see in ourselves or can be inspired to see.
So my initial efforts at adopting and understanding my title were mostly plebian, trying to inspire other people with low-ish self-esteem into thinking better of themselves and their possibilities. Everyone can be some kind of artist, and the whole initial idea of the Jell-O Art Show was to make art more accessible and less tied into the world of fine art, art criticism, and hierarchy. I have been transformed by Jell-O Art into thinking and feeling like a Real Artist and it has been truly joyful for me. Yet I have never really been comfortable in an elevated role. If it weren't a comedic prank and so irreverent I wouldn't still be doing it.
So I'm exploring what it really means to me to be a Queen of Jell-O Art. What part of it is just the crown, and how does that particular crown fit in the world with So Many Queens! I mean, one less, since Elizabeth died, but still no shortage, particularly on the internet. And there have now been forty years of Slug Queens in Eugene. When will it end? Can there be Too Many Queens? I sense a song coming on...and that needs to happen, too. So that's where I am starting.
Here are a couple of things I am trying...if I can get them out in one piece and curve them around into crown-ish shapes without tearing them apart, we'll see. I doubt it will work, but it got me interested. So I hope you find a way to get started. I seem to need a new technique to try...a challenge. This will be the thirty-second or third or thirty-fourth year after all. I've lost track. We started in 1988, but then skipped one year, and do we count the two years we kind of didn't have shows? Yes, I do, but not everyone feels the same. And we call it Annual, but it isn't if you skip a year. Or is it? We don't really have an Authority Figure to declare it. I sometimes act that way, but everyone laughs.
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